How to Resize PDF Documents to a Smaller File Size

Your presentation is ready. The infographics are great. You are very happy with the visuals. There’s a single problem: when exported to PDF, the document has 450MB. It’s a lot.

Sounds familiar?

This usually happens because the resources inside the PDF were not optimised. Here are some tips on keeping your PDF documents small:

Use smaller images

Use less fonts

If you’re creating for the screen, 120 ppi should be enough. Use a service like TinyPNG to compress your images before embedding.

Use fewer fonts if possible. Each font file gets embedded into the PDF document, adding to its size.

Large PDF documents can’t be sent as attachment. Most of the times emails can handle up to 25Mb.

You could use a service like WeTransfer or Dropbox to share the PDF document and add a link to the email instead of attaching it. But if the document is still large, this only shifts the burden on your recipients, who will have to download the large file.

Merging PDF files online and keeping existing bookmarks

The problem: you have a few Chapters from a book or project documentation and you would like to merge them into a single PDF document. It’s easier to search and navigate. It’s easier to mail or link to online.

Generate a bookmark for each merged PDF document

This works nicely when the merged PDF documents don’t have bookmarks themselves, but you’d like to easily navigate the merged PDF document. Usually used in tandem with the Table of Contents generation feature.